A Mathematical Thriller and an Exhibition of What Could Go Wrong

Film: The Imitation Game. Opens in New York and Los Angeles Nov. 21, and nationwide in December.

The Imitation Game - Official Trailer HD - The Weinstein CompanyCreditVideo by The Weinstein Company

A thriller about the British mathematician Alan Turing might sound about as likely as a valid proof by Jean-Claude Van Damme. But this blockbuster starring Benedict Cumberbatch delivers on the thrills, if not the proofs. The movie centers on the secret years the logician spent working to decipher a German naval cipher known as Enigma, using early digital computers inspired by his vision of a “universal machine.” The director uses every device to raise the stakes — sequences of wartime carnage, flashbacks to a lonely and bullied boyhood, montages showing the code-breaking machine jolting to life with spinning wheels and tangled red wires. The script takes liberties with the historical record, but after all this is a Hollywood movie. Despite Mr. Cumberbatch’s recent comment that Turing had a “witty and rather lovely personality,” the film depicts him as mostly humorless and haughty. But here is what it gets right: the immense strategic value of cracking the Enigma code and the absurd tragedy of Turing’s persecution after the war, for nothing more than the crime of loving other men.

Museum: Nature’s Fury: The Science of Natural Disasters. American Museum of Natural History, third floor. Opens Nov. 15. Adults $27, children $16, seniors and students $22.

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A large fissure formed on a San Francisco street after the 1906 earthquake.CreditThe Field Museum

Natural disasters, because of their huge scale and relative infrequency, pose threats that are inherently hard to predict. This interactive exhibition, adapted from the Field Museum in Chicago, helps clarify the risks. There are seismic events like earthquakes and volcanoes, which draw energy from Earth’s hot interior: Visitors will have a chance to see wine bottles and doorknobs melted by the eruption of Mount Pelée, which killed tens of thousands on the island of Martinique in 1902. From the air, the big threats are tornadoes and hurricanes: An immersive theater lets visitors stand in the center of a Great Plains tornado, and the exhibit explains the “perfect storm” of circumstances that led to devastating water damage during Hurricane Sandy, and how New York City rebuilt. For all its doom, the exhibit touches only briefly on climate change, which some models predict will make storms like Sandy more frequent and severe.

For a decade and a half, this festival has served as a laboratory for science-based theater in the city, offering works in progress in a bare-bones setting. This year, many of the scripts deal with young people whose lives were touched by science — sometimes not for the better. A comedy about a son of Benjamin Franklin questions the merits of growing up in the shadow of a great mind. Other plays were inspired by the 2011 outbreak of a mysterious neurological tic among high-school cheerleaders in upstate New York, and the story of a boy who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision. If all this sounds a little dark, at least there is a musical at the end of the tunnel, one that whimsically puts the physicist Hugh Everett III and his wife in all manner of hypothetical scenarios, romantic and otherwise, in accord with his “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics.

For seven years, Le Laboratoire in Paris has provided a hub for high-concept, science-based art and design at an exhibition space not far from the Louvre. When it moves to Cambridge, where its founder David Edwards teaches at Harvard, it will be surrounded by biotech companies. The space’s first exhibition, a collaboration between the composer Tod Machover and the designer Neri Oxman, employs a small ceramic “orb” that channels the vibrations of the voice into the hands, part of a larger effort to measure the effect of singing on mental focus, physical relaxation and self-awareness. Future installations at the new space include an installation by an artist and a marine biologist about the impact of jellyfish on ocean biodiversity. The building will also hold Café ArtScience, a restaurant with a “WikiBar” where diners can test culinary novelties like edible packaging and aromatic texting.